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Brave New Worlds? More, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Swift on the Age of Exploration

Thursday, June 6, 2013

(This program continues for multiple sessions)

Thursdays, June 6 – August 1 (class will not meet July 4)

5:45 – 7:45 pm

Led by Stuart Patterson

This class has been cancelled.

This seminar investigates how Europe’s “age of exploration” spurred new examinations of the human condition. Through Thomas More’s Utopia, Michel de Montaigne’s “On Cannibals,” William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and contextualized with the Newberry’s extensive collections on early modern exploration, we will grapple with the deep ambivalence all these works reveal about the simultaneously “savage” and “civilized” aspects of humanity apparent in worlds both “new” and “old.”

Stuart Patterson regularly teaches all the works in this course as Associate Professor of Liberal Arts at Shimer College in Chicago.